Five Shades of Gray
by silvrethorn
Summary: Three short character studies, set during the Misguided Miscreants episodes: Jin contemplates the dead, Mugen contemplates the sea, and Fuu contemplates her own reflection...or is it really hers?
1. Chapter 1

Lead and Steel: Jin

by

Silvrethorn

The crows led him there. Ever the outriders of death, their wheeling, crying numbers warned the samurai what he would find. The number of bodies piled in the ravine did not surprise him--the empty village meant just one thing, and the only question, answered by the crows, was where to find the bodies. Nor did the variety of the dead dismay him; old men and young children, grandmothers and maidens heaped together, and on the top the torn bodies of men. All the people of the village were here, save the men who fought best, and those were taken by the pirates who had built this mountain of corpses.

No. What sketched the frown on the samurai's still face was the smallest of things, the tiny black holes in the foreheads of the dead at his feet. Bullet holes. Dozens, scores of bullet holes. With one simple movement of a single finger these people had fallen like trees before a tidal wave, not by steel--the old way, the honorable way--but by lead and gunpowder, the clockwork reaver of a new age.

The samurai lifted his hand and touched the hilt of his sword. A sea breeze rippled his clothes and swept the hair across his face, a breeze tinged with the first, faint odor of decay. For a long time he stood on the brink of the ravine and stared down into the darkness of the bullet holes, the darkness of a future where the steel under his hand was no defense against the softest of metals, and he and his kind were nothing but shadows and memories.

"I am not a ghost," he said softly.

The crows circled and cried, their caws like mocking laughter.


	2. Chapter 2

Storm and Smoke: Mugen

by

Silvrethorn

She never forgot him, the young man who stood beside the boats staring out to sea. She never forgot him though she lived ninety years, and even in the blindness of old age she saw him still, the details of his face and clothes blurred by time, but his eyes--oh, his eyes.

She should have asked him for help. She was alone, her village's sole survivor, a small, frightened child cowering in the bottom of her dead father's fishing boat. He was a man, young, but with a man's resources. She had only to move, to make a noise to attract his attention, but his eyes warned her away--eyes the color of gunsmoke, hard as the crack of a gunshot. There was no mercy in those eyes, no more than in the empty, gray sea that filled their gaze, and the girl remained silent and still, alone in a gray world, watching the wind stir the stranger's hair as storm clouds built above the breakers.

Watching his eyes, gray as the sea.

The sea, gray as the clouds.

The clouds, gray as the storm raging in the stranger's eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

Silver

by

Silvrethorn

"Oh, Jin, look! Isn't it beautiful?" The glitter of silver in the empty cottage caught Fuu's eye the moment she looked inside. That the shining object turned out to be a hairpin and not coins mattered little. Fuu knew quality when she saw it, and the hairpin was very fine.

"Put it back where you found it." Fuu looked up at her companion, stung. The samurai was rarely sharp with her, but there was no mistaking the tone of his voice. Fuu turned the pin in her hands.

"But the owner is..."

"Dead, yes. They're all dead."

"But..." She said this to herself; Jin was no longer listening. The silver gleamed softly, and Fuu could see her face reflected in the polished shank. As its owner must have seen her own face every time she held it.

But was it Fuu's own face she saw? Or was it someone else's? In the dim light it was difficult to tell. The reflected eyes seemed darker, the hair longer, the face thinner and older. Fuu gasped and dropped the hairpin on the table she had taken it from.

"Jin! Wait!" Fuu called, and leaving the things of the dead in the house of the dead she hurried in the steps of her living companion.


End file.
